Cleveland Steel Container: Efficiencies and Insights with Data Warehouse Project

Cleveland Steel Container (CSC) needed a data warehouse revamp. A previous data warehouse project hadn’t provided the value they’d hoped for, so they sought a new partner who would take the time to investigate and understand their needs, go beyond out-of-the-box solutions, and help train and empower their growing analytics department to take the reins. CSC reached out directly to WhereScape, who knew right away to bring in Resultant.

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The Problem

Cleveland Steel Container (CSC) needed a data warehouse revamp. A previous data warehouse project hadn’t provided the value they’d hoped for, so they sought a new partner who would take the time to investigate and understand their needs, go beyond out-of-the-box solutions, and help train and empower their growing analytics department to take the reins. CSC reached out directly to WhereScape, who knew right away to bring in Resultant.

CSC’s old reporting system didn’t have clear documentation about the hows and whys of the business criteria and rules it utilized to generate reports. As reporting needs evolved and required new information, it was easier to build new logic layers on top of what existed than to dig down and figure out what to rewrite. However, these layers acted more like band-aids than sustainable solutions for their data’s long-term health.

To get any usable reports, team members followed a cumbersome, time-consuming, error-prone process, and couldn’t generate reports much more often than monthly.

To support growth and stay aligned with their goals, CSC needed help to

  • Decipher the existing rules and rewrite them.
  • Standardize what the rules should be across the organization.
  • Build a data warehouse solution to easily provide more timely and insightful reporting.

About the Client

Cleveland Steel Container is one of the largest manufacturers of steel pails in the United States, marketing its products throughout North America to both Fortune 500 companies and small, family-owned businesses.

Outcomes

  • Faster reporting response and generation times with more drill-down capabilities
  • New dashboards with previously unavailable insights
  • Automated daily scrap and variance reporting relative to production numbers
  • Deeper access into sales team members’ data for leadership to more effectively mentor and guide individuals
  • Consistent internal finance processes to more accurately understand exact costs of goods sold, labor, and distribution
  • New automated data processes that bring efficiency to the finance team

Our approach

In our discovery phase, we found far more layers of nested logic than anyone anticipated.

We knew this wasn’t a simple “build a widget” situation and that a sustainable solution meant untangling decades of knots in the logic to get to the root of CSC’s issues. The cloud data warehouse construction work that followed not only made information more actionable for CSC but also filled in procedural details and even some operational knowledge gaps.

We’d look at what everyone thought was a simple metric and then realize it was eight layers deep. We’d have to dig through all those layers of reporting to find how it truly was calculated.

- Preston Howell, Client Success Leader at Resultant

CSC’s data warehouse development revealed solutions for current data and process issues and led to achieving big wins:

  • Enhanced reports automatically generate daily, eliminating difficult manual monthly processes.
  • Reports give greater visibility into new business trends and sales activity.
  • Accounts receivable (AR) report transformed from 500 printed pages to an interactive dashboard with critical points highlighted.
  • Increased capabilities for AR application processing, highlighting customers with higher-than-expected application complexity.
  • AR aging includes net-zero accounts with open transactions, unavailable in previous reporting.
  • AR aging includes customer purchase history, previously only available as separate records.
  • Daily scrap steel data enables a strategic approach to the production process byproduct, not possible with monthly reporting.

The Impact

In the eleven months of partnering with CSC, we replaced key legacy reporting for the sales and financial subject areas with dashboards of accurate, timely, actionable information. These analytics improvements enable CSC to better manage and understand their company by providing:

  • Faster reporting response and generation times with more drill-down capabilities
  • New dashboards with previously unavailable insights
  • Automated daily scrap and variance reporting relative to production numbers
  • Deeper access into sales team members’ data for leadership to more effectively mentor and guide individuals
  • Consistent internal finance processes to more accurately understand exact costs of goods sold, labor, and distribution
  • New automated data processes that bring efficiency to the finance team

This is what we have been needing. Getting this out of Discoverer took too long and was complicated.

Sales Rep

Cleveland Steel Container

This is amazing. I’ve been asking for something like this for years.

Key Account Manager

Cleveland Steel Container

The item-level detail and ease to get it was so perfect. This is going to pay itself back in no time.

Dan Roether

VP of Sales,   Cleveland Steel Container

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